Canadian Theatre Encyclopedia
Tova, Theresa
Ontario-based actor/writer/singer, born in Paris in 1955 and raised in Calgary. She is the daughter of Polish Jewish parents who survived the Holocaust.
Among the companies where she has played are Centaur Theatre (Friedman Family Fortune, 1996) and in the national touring company of Livent's Ragtime. In 1996, she created a sensation with her musical theatre piece, Still The Night, about two young girls who survived the Holocaust by hiding in the forests of Poland. The play combines the Jewish music of vaudeville and klezmer. The Theatre Passe Muraille production won four Dora Mavor Moore Awards in the Mid-Sized Theatre division in 1997: for outstanding new play or musical, outstanding production, outstanding music (John Alcorn) and outstanding female performance in a musical (Liza Balkan). Still the Night subsequently toured across Canada.
Her musical Bella: The Colour of Love, played to sold-out houses in Philadelphia, Warsaw, Poland, Halifax, Toronto and New York.
In 1999, she appeared in the Saidye Bronfman Centre production of They're Playing Our Song ; and in 2000, in Stratford Festival productions of Fiddler on the Roof, and Patience. For Theatre Aquarius, she appeared in The Diary of Ann Frank (2009) and For This Moment (2010).
She has also acted on television, notably as the hard-nosed video editor in the CTV series ENG.
She has performed Yiddish songs widely in Canada and the U.S., and released four CDs.
From 2017 to 2021, she was President of the Toronto chapter of ACTRA, where she launched an initiative to combat harassment in the workplace by establishing a code of conduct.
Theresa Tova has been married to Bob Pearson since 1983. They have two children.
Profile by Gaetan Charlebois. Updated by Anne Nothof
Last updated 2022-02-09
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The Canadian Theatre Encyclopedia web site was originally conceived and developed in 1996 by Gaetan Charlebois—theatre critic, playwright, and actor.
